1.21 blog

This past Sunday, I preached a sermon from Jonah 2, where Jonah cries out to God from the belly of a great fish. This is the first time in the book that Jonah prays. In chapter one, he was on a sinking ship, full of sailors crying out to their gods, and begging him to cry out to his God. But he didn’t. Then he’s thrown overboard, nearly drowns, and is rescued by being swallowed by a giant fish. God supernaturally keeps him alive inside the fish, and after three days, Jonah finally prays. Let’s think about this. God has rescued him, and is preserving him, and it takes him three days to get around to praying. This guys and idiot!

And we do the same thing. We more or less go through the week as atheists. Sure, many Christians will spend a few moments glancing at their Bible or trying to mumble a few prayers as their day begins. But by the time you get to the middle of the day, where real life happens, we’ve forgotten all about God. When was the last time God was a significant factor in your decision making? Or the last time you spontaneously gave him thanks for his gifts (and before a meal doesn’t count)?

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think one of the causes of this is that churches have forgotten how to relate to God in the ordinary. Evangelicals have this tendency to be very “spiritual,” looking down on “material” and “mundane” things (which tends towards the heresies of Gnosticism and Docetism). And because this is the case, there’s a tendency to expect to find God in odd, extraordinary, bolt-out-of-the-blue ways. I’ve had a few of those, but they’ve been few and far between. It’s good to have such experiences. It’s good to desire them. But the problem is that they can tend to cloud the way God normally relates to us.

The ways God relates to us are often quite ordinary, mundane, and (dare I say?) boring. And that’s great, because that’s how real life is! It’s ordinary, by definition! And of course it’s mundane, we live in the mundum (Latin for world). The idea that we should avoid the mundane is a devaluation of the created order established by God (which he said was very good). God has created this world. He has given us bodies. He’s ordered human life so that we have our common tasks, etc. He has established all of this.

And that means that while our lives are ordinary and mundane, they are by no means trivial. Because God has created and established our boring ordinary lives, they are shot through with significance. And it’s in those ordinary, “boring” moments that we relate to God. So perhaps, rather than expecting God to rend the heavens and shake the earth all the time, we should ask God to help us appreciate and find him in the ordinary mundane lives he has given us.

Just some food for thought.

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger